Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Do you mean, whether he was inclined some such way?”

  “I have sometimes wished that he were.”

  “He may have been,” the doctor mused. “I knew him very little before I came here. But there is a sort of crime, isn’t there, in pushing a man in the direction of a natural propensity? You don’t want to palliate what was done?”

  “Mr. Langbrith was capable of any crime,” she answered. “Sometimes I have to shield his memory. But I don’t wish to do it when I needn’t. That is the comfort, the rest, of talking with you. I can’t tell you what a kind of awful happiness it is to say out to you the things I cannot say to any one else. You will think I am crazy, but the next greatest happiness I have is in hoping that his fancy is taken with her, and that somehow it can be made up to them in that way. And yet there is a ghastliness in that, too, that is awful.”

  He knew that now she was talking of her son and of Hawberk’s daughter. When she added, “She ought to know, at least,” he said:

  “Oh, everybody ought to know. But it is no more possible for her to be told than for any one else. I should be glad if he could get so good a girl. She is a beautiful creature, too, as well as good. Well!” He rose from his chair, but from hers she entreated almost unawares, “Oh, don’t go! Or, I oughtn’t to say it!”

  “No, Amelia, you oughtn’t. If you said something else, I need never go.” He looked at her sadly, and her head drooped. “You let me see an image of home, like this, and then you take it from me. Well! I must submit. Good-night.” He put out his hand to her, but she would not take it.

  She lifted her eyes to his, “You haven’t asked me if I tried to speak to James. I didn’t!”

  “I knew that.”

  “Perhaps I should — perhaps I should have tried, this morning, when we were alone, if — But perhaps I couldn’t.”

  “If what?”

  “If he hadn’t fancied that you did something last night that showed dislike of Mr. Langbrith.”

  “What was it I did?”

  “Something in the way you received his suggestion of the memorial tablet.”

  “Oh, he noticed that? Well, I couldn’t help it.”

  “I know you couldn’t. Do you think I blame you?”

  “I believe we don’t blame each other, Amelia.”

  “And you don’t feel hard towards me for not trying?”

  “I didn’t expect you to try.”

  “But why shouldn’t we go on like this — the way we have gone on for twenty years? Why shouldn’t you be just my friend as long as you live? We are not young, and we couldn’t expect what young people expect of marriage.”

  “I expect a great deal more,” he said. “You are solitary, and so am I. I have never had a home, and you could give me one. I have never had companionship at the time when a man wants it most, and you could be my companion. I want some one to talk to and to be silent to, when I feel the need of either. You could be my daughter, my mother, my sister. Why do you make me say these things to you?”

  “Well, then, why not come and let me be it here?

  Why not come and make this your home? I know James wouldn’t object. I believe he would like to have you live with us. He has always been used to you—” Anther shook his head.

  “Yes, yes,” she persisted. “We could give you all the room you wanted in the house here, and you could have Mr. Langbrith’s office for your office, out there by the gate. I have thought how it could be done—”

  “It couldn’t be done, Amelia. The talk it would make in a place like Saxmills!”

  “There wouldn’t be any talk. You have been here so long, and you are so respected. You have always been our doctor, and you have been in and out here day and night. You are like one of the family. You could come now, when Mrs. Burwell is going to give up her house, and you will have to go somewhere else, anyhow. It hasn’t made talk your living there with her all these years, and why should your living here do it? Sit down now, and let me tell you—”

  She had put her hand unconsciously on his arm and was nervously pinching the sleeve. He took her hand away and held it in his own. “I never think of Mrs. Burwell, nor she of me; but we two would always be thinking of each other. It wouldn’t do, my dear, and you know it.”

  She broke out piteously, “I am so afraid of James!”

  “Yes, I understand that, and I should be afraid of him, too, if I came here to live with you, unless I came as your husband. In that case, I shouldn’t be afraid of him.”

  “Ah, you hate him! I can see it by the way you say that. What shall I do?”

  “Nothing, Amelia, except be reasonable. I don’t hate your son; how could I? Of course, your fear of him stands in our way, but I am not at all sure that he does. He might have done so, a few years ago, but there is less probability that he would now.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He is more rational. He is of a nature that matures late; he is like you, in that, Amelia. That friend of his, that young man, told me how slowly James has won upon the liking and understanding of his college mates. They did not like him at first, but now, in his last year, they are beginning to value him, to make allowances for what repelled them, to see how he has changed, and to have an affection for him.” In his gloss of Falk’s laconic terms, Anther did not feel that he was misinterpreting his statement of Langbrith’s Harvard standing; his mother eagerly accepted the version, and imagined it insufficient. “I say this,” the doctor went on, “merely to illustrate my meaning. He is now at the age when the mind acts with an insight unknown to it before, and besides—” Anther broke off, and then asked, after a moment: “What reason have you for thinking that he is seriously taken with Hope? How is it different with them from what it has always been?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it is his being away, and then coming back and finding her changed into a new person. Girls change so suddenly at her age. If he had stayed at home, they might have gone on being boy and girl together always. But as it is — Perhaps it is partly the way I have seen him look at her — with a kind of surprise. And this morning, he spoke of her with so much — Oh, if it only could be, what a load it would take off my heart!”

  “It would take the main obstacle out of our path, too,” Anther responded. “He would judge you somewhat more from himself.”

  Mrs. Langbrith colored faintly, with a kind of shame, which he saw and resented.

  “You think it isn’t the same thing!”

  “No,” she owned. “How could I? It is as right for us, though it is different, as it is for them. But—”

  She stopped, and even after he had said, “Well?” she did not go on immediately.

  Then she shook her head, and added, “It wouldn’t get over the great obstacle. There would still be — Mr. Langbrith.”

  “Then,” said Anther, harshly, “we must remove that obstacle, that incubus, ourselves. That man’s memory mustn’t be allowed to be a lifelong nightmare to you. You suffered enough from him when he was alive. We must tell James about him.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Then you must let me.”

  She slowly turned her head away. “It’s too late,” she sighed.

  “No. Now is just the time. Before this, it would have been too soon. While he was a child, you could not have told him; I understand that; and you had to let him grow up in the superstition of such a father as he imagines. But now he is old enough and strong enough to have his fetish taken from him. You owe it to him to take it. Put me out of the question entirely. I will never speak to you again of what I wish—”

  “Oh, do you think that would be any help?” she lamented.

  “At any rate, it is the boy’s right to know the truth now.”

  “I always,” she tried to evade him, “hoped that some accident—”

  “But it never did. And it never will. That isn’t the way of accident. It doesn’t manage beneficent surprises.”

  “It is too late. I can’t let you tell him the trut
h, and I can’t myself. It must be covered up, more and more! It must be hidden forever. But there is something — something you might do, and you could do it.”

  “For you?”

  “For him — for me.”

  “Of course, I will do it.”

  “I don’t know. You could help him — help me. What harm would there be in your humoring the child?”

  “How, humoring him?”

  “Why shouldn’t you encourage him — why should you oppose him in putting up that tablet? Or not that! Why should you be so cold with him about it?”

  Anther walked out into the hall, and got his hat and coat from the rack there before he spoke. “Amelia!” he cried with a sternness that he let die out of his voice before he added, “Oh, poor woman! That scoundrel has had power to corrupt even you, even now.”

  He opened the outer door, and, while she stood on the threshold of the parlor, with entreating hands stretched towards him, he closed the door behind him without looking back at her.

  XIII

  MRS. BURWELL came to call Dr. Anther to breakfast as soon as she heard him in his office. He had been up late overnight, and, with the fretful patience which had not failed her in twenty years of obedience, she had obeyed his instructions not to call him in such a case at the established hour of seven. His breakfast was always ready at seven, and it would have been some consolation to give him his breakfast cold, if he ever noticed whether it was cold or hot, but he did not, and she failed of this comfort. Among the reasons which had decided her at last to give up house-keeping and go to live with her married daughter in Nashua, the irregularity of Dr. Anther at breakfast would have been found first by any one who cared to study them, but it was one which she urged last upon the inquirer’s attention. She said that it had been clearly agreed upon at the beginning, and that she was not one to take back her word.

  He sat before his desk opening his letters, with his revolving bookcase by his side, and, in the long case between the two windows behind him, the pendulent skeleton which he had bought with his practice, from his predecessor. When the case was closed, it looked like a grandfather’s clock in shape, and when it was open it still suggested the intimate relation of time and death. There was a table in the room, and over this were scattered medical periodicals, and other publications more suited to the taste and intelligence of patients waiting for his return when he was out. There were some hard chairs which did not invite their fancy from the stem realities of life by luxurious appeals to the senses.

  “Lorenzo Hawberk’s b’en here,” Mrs. Burwell complained to the back of the doctor’s bowed head. “He said he would call in again. I don’t know but what you’ll find your coffee pretty cold,” she lamented further.

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Anther said, still without lifting his head, and, when he had quite finished with his morning’s mail, he followed her vanishing into the hall without, and thence into the dining-room.

  If he had been the sort of man to realize the order of facts to which any article of food belonged by its condition, he would have found not only his coffee cold, but his biscuit and his steak cold, too. But he was only vaguely aware of something wrong, as a child is when it is in discomfort, and his sense extended itself still more vaguely to an impression of the room, and of Mrs. Burwell herself. They were both severely neat, and they were both of the same material and spiritual spareness. Beginning with the hard little knot which Mrs. Burwell’s silver-sanded hair was tightly drawn up into, away from her face, a more than classic temperance of ornament was characteristic of both. In her and in the room, everything was designed and disposed with a view to not catching dust. The clock on the mantel, supported by two Japanese fans, and the four prints on the four walls, representing severally the Lincoln Family at Breakfast, the Battle of Gettysburg, the long-extinct husband of Mrs. Burwell, and the United States Senate listening to the speech of Mr. Webster of Massachusetts in reply to Mr. Hayne of South Carolina, united with the sideboard, on which there was nothing that could not be shut away in its drawers the moment the breakfast things were washed up, in preserving a condition which not only would not catch dust, but in which there was no dust to catch.

  “Did he leave any word?” Dr. Anther answered, not troubling himself to name Hawberk in his question.

  “No, he just said he would be back; there was nothing particular the matter. I suppose he’s begun again.”

  Hawberk’s habit was so notorious in Saxmills that Mrs. Burwell felt it no violation of that other convention between herself and her tenant, dating from the beginning, like the agreement in regard to breakfast, that she was not to offer any sort of comment upon his patients, their characters, their ailments, or affairs. All the same, he snubbed her by his tacit refusal to enter into the case of Hawberk with her.

  “Have you heard from your daughter again, Mrs. Burwell?” he asked.

  “No, I hain’t,” she said, with an effect of being resolved to have no concealments. “But, as far forth as that goes, I don’t know as I expected to.”

  “Then you are still decided to go to her?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I am,” she said, as little decidedly in words as a woman well could.

  “Supposing won’t do,” Anther pursued. “I must know whether you really intend to go or not, for I must find some other quarters if you do, and I want time.”

  “Well, then, I am. I suppose I said ‘suppose’ because I didn’t want to seem to be hurrying you up any.”

  “You’ll hurry me up if you don’t give me due notice.”

  Mrs. Burwell’s hard mouth and hard eyes joined in the adamantine response which she made. “I’m goin’ to leave this house the first day of July, no sooner and no later, as far as I can humanly fix it.”

  “Oh, well, then,” Anther said, “that gives me plenty of time to look about. I thought you were going in June.”

  “Well,” she admitted, reluctantly, and without that bravado of frankness which she had shown before, “I did some think of goin’ in June, and I did think I might as well stay the summer out here. It’s full more comfortable than what it is in Nashua, with the heat, and it’s easier to begin in a new place where you’ve got to be shut up a good deal; anyway, by beginnin’ in the fall of the year.”

  “Yes, that is so,” the doctor granted, and Mrs.

  Burwell chose to read a sympathy into his words which they did not express.

  “I presume that I shall feel the change, and I presume you will, some.”

  “Yes, I shall hate the moving.”

  “That’s what I mean. And I wonder you want to move. Why don’t you take the house yourself? It’ll be to rent when I give it up. You could keep your old rooms here, and get somebody in to do for you — I don’t know but what Orlando himself could. He’s real handy about a house, and he knows your ways — till you could get somebody to take the rest of the house. You could meal out; you’re so irregular, anyway. I declare I feel bad about breakin’ you up here, and I don’t like to have anybody comin’ in that I don’t know.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Burwell,” Anther said to the part of her speech that demanded thanks from him.

  “I don’t, one bit,” she continued, with the other part. “And still I don’t want to have it, as you may say, layin’ empty.”

  “No, it would be a certain expense, and you would get no return from it.”

  “Yes, and a house wears out faster when it’s empty. I’d be willing to let it to anybody that would take good care of it for two hundred and fifty a year.”

  “That would be reasonable.”

  “Why, it wouldn’t hardly more than pay the repairs and taxes,” Mrs. Burwell urged. “I shouldn’t expect to make anything on it, though goodness knows I need to, with everything as dear as they say it is to Nashua. I expect to pay good board to my daughter, though I presume I shall do enough about the house to make up without payin’ anything.”

  “Well, I’ll see about it.”

  “So do.�
�� Mrs. Burwell did not rise, but stretched her long arm across the table for the doctor’s plate; she cleaned it into her own, and began to put the table in order for his uncertain dinner before he left the room. He went out of the side door upon a back porch, where Mrs. Burwell considered it neater to do certain parts of her housework than indoors, and more convenient for the disposal of pea-pods, squash seeds, and all kinds of cores and peelings, as well as those bits of refuse from fowls and butcher’s-meat which she could throw to the hens, netted into their yard beside the stable, without having contaminated her kitchen with them. She preferred to work there not only in summer, but as far into the winter as she could bear the cold, and, wrapped up as to her head and shoulders, she defied the elements till after Thanksgiving and well towards Christmas. Her back yard, between this porch and the stable, was as clean as the front yard, which dropped from the terrace where the house stood, and sloped three yards and no more to the white paling fence in the gloom of four funereal firs, cropped upward, as their boughs died of their own denseness, till their trunks showed as high as the chamber windows. The house was painted of a whiteness which age had never been suffered to soften, but was as coldly fresh as the green of the shutters; it had been there thirty years, but it stood as prim and new to the eye in every detail as if it had been finished the week before. Mrs. Burwell herself never appeared in the front yard except to pick up the fir twigs dropped in the spindling grass that bearded the terrace; in the immediate shadow of the trees no grass grew, and the ground was matted with the dark-brown decay of their spray and spills, and looked as if it were burned over.

  Dr. Anther noted that his buggy must have been driven to the front gate, since there were no signs of it at the stable door, and he walked round the house, and looked up at its frigid façade with a novel interest. It had been long since he had looked at it, though he had daily gone in and out, and had slept in the northeast chamber ever since he had been Mrs. Burwell’s lodger. A certain shallowness of the structure now appeared to him, and he realized that the front was but one room deep on each side of the door, and that it shrank behind into the ell which imperfectly supported its pretensions of squareness, by stretching into an indefinite extent of kitchen and woodshed beyond the dining-room. He perceived that he had the two best rooms, but that the parlor, and the chamber above it, which was kept as a guest-room, though he could not remember when there had been a guest in it, were as large, if not as pleasant, as his own. Prom the fact of back stairs, he had always inferred a chamber over the dining-room, and he had conjectured something of the sort in the sloping roof of the kitchen. There were, then, eight rooms in all, and it did not seem to Anther, though he gave the matter no very distinct thought, that there were too many for the money that Mrs. Burwell proposed getting for it in a place like Saxmills. He dropped his cursory glance from the façade to the front door, and noted, with the sort of novel interest that the whole had inspired, the name of Justin Anther, M.D., on its small, glass-foamed plate, and then he went in-doors.